Barbie is one of the most buzzed about movies of the summer, and the more sneak peeks we see of it, the more we love. (Is it July 21 yet?) And while the star of the show—Margot Robbie, who plays the title character—has been getting the lion’s share of attention on the film’s worldwide press tour, lest we forget that there is one Ryan Gosling who plays Ken, and he’s the subject of our latest glimpse into the blockbuster.
In a new clip, we see Gosling sing “I’m Just Ken,” where a shirtless Gosling (here for it) is “shown singing dramatically on a bed about always being ‘No. 2’ to Barbie, and later crooning about ‘blonde fragility,’” People reports. A lyric from the song says “I’m just Ken. Where I see love, she sees a friend. What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?” The clip also shows an emotional Ken saying, “I just don’t know who I am without you,” to which Robbie as Barbie replies “You’re Ken!” “But it’s ‘Barbie and Ken,’” Gosling says. “There is no just Ken.”
This, of course, isn’t Gosling’s first rodeo singing tunes in a film—in 2016, it was Emma Stone who was the recipient of Gosling’s romantic tunes in La La Land. Gosling admitted that he wasn’t sure about playing the iconic doll at first, speaking at CinemaCon this past April and saying “I only knew Ken from afar. I didn’t know Ken from within, and, if I’m being really honest, I doubted my Ken-ergy. I didn’t see it, but Margot and Greta, they conjured this out of me somehow,” referring to costar Robbie and the movie’s director, Greta Gerwig.
He continued “It was like I was living my life and then one day I was bleaching my hair, shaving my legs, and wearing bespoke neon outfits and rollerblading down Venice Beach. It came on like a light scarlet fever. Then I woke up one day and was like, ‘Why is there fake tanner in my sheets? What just happened?’”
Robbie had high praise for her costar, telling People “Ryan is the most comedically gifted actor I have ever worked with. He really is. He’s known for his dramatic acting, and rightly so. But he is unbelievably gifted with comedy, and I ruined most of his takes because I was laughing through all of it.”
Just 10 more days to go until we can see it all for ourselves.
